Gad Saad’s “The Parasitic Mind”: A Reasonable Premise Gone Awry

In his review of Douglas Murray’s recent book, The Madness of Crowds, my Merion West colleague Matt McManus wrote that “[t]he anti-Social Justice Warrior (SJW) monograph written by an up-and-coming conservative commentator is practically a genre of literature at this point,” and he points out that it also seems to have become almost a rite of passage. This is especially true at a time when so much of the public discourse has been set by the group of public intellectuals known as the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), many of whom have made their careers criticizing social justice activism. Just this year, Dave Rubin’s Don’t Burn This Book and James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories were published. It is in this context that Gad Saad published his new book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas are Killing Common Sense. Right from the start, then, Saad’s book comes into a highly crowded field. So, given that the subject matter is not very original, one ought to expect, at least, that the treatment of the topic was innovative.

The title and the premise of the book are certainly promising in this regard. As the title suggests, it proposes that we treat the ideas it seeks to criticize as pathogens that can infect the mind and, like real pathogens, propagate from one host to another. Now, this is not an entirely original idea; Lindsay and Pluckrose often use the metaphor of postmodernism as a virus in Cynical Theories, but at least it is one of the less explored ideas. Unfortunately, for Saad, this is one of the few strengths of the book. Other than this relatively novel idea, not much in the book is new. I do not believe it would quite be fair to say that if one has read one anti-SJW monograph, one has read all of them. However, this particular one does not offer anything new—other than the relative novelty of the pathogen metaphor. The rest of the book’s themes are essentially just familiar IDW tropes: Postmodernism and feminism are destroying the West; college campuses are ideologically indoctrinating students; SJWs prioritize feelings over facts; and we need to preserve the Western commitments to liberty, free speech, reason, and science. This—in and of itself—does not have to be an indictment of the book. All of these ideas could be addressed compellingly. The problem is that most of the book does not even meet the standards that Saad sets for himself in the beginning.

In the opening chapter, Saad describes—in no uncertain terms—how he adheres to intellectual standards far higher than those of most people. He recalls: “Growing up, my mother repeatedly warned me that the world did not abide by my punishingly strict standards of intellectual, ethical, and moral purity, let alone follow my pathological commitment to honesty and probity.” Further, he explains that he finds science liberating because “[i]t offers a framework for auto-correction because scientific knowledge is always provisional.” While this kind of self-aggrandizement might be annoying to some—and there is a lot of it throughout the book—I think one can look past it if it is backed up by work that lives up to it. The Parasitic Mind, however, most certainly does not accomplish this.